When viewed from Britain in the eighteenth century, the empire was still a distant matter, notwithstanding the numerous ways in which it already laced domestic life. As with his other writings, the depth and reach of Edmund Burke's insight into the turgid functioning of the empire had everything to do with the deployment of a moral imagination, which alloyed self-understanding and sympathy. Burke not only reflected on the complexity of the empire, he also expressed a sustained and deep reluctance toward it. Burke's involvement with British-Indian affairs began in 1767, the year he first entered Parliament, and concluded in his public role in 1795, two years before his death. The other issue on which Burke focused his attention involved the British practices through which the social and political coherence of India was being dismembered. The term "nation" and its cognates are scarce in Burke's writings.